Father Kircher’s Big Beautiful Books

Medical data debates: big is better? Small is beautiful?

The genetics of obstructive lung disease: big is beautiful.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is defined as airflow obstruction that is not fully reversible. It results from abnormal inflammation following exposure to noxious particles or gases. This is typically exposure to cigarette smoke but may also include exposure to biomass fuels and some industrial dusts. COPD clusters within families, suggesting that heritable factors play a role in ...

Is big beautiful? The continuing story of ADAM33 and asthma.

T he gene encoding A Disintegrin And Metalloprotease (ADAM) 33 was the first asthma susceptibility gene to be discovered by positional cloning. In 460 families enriched with asthma, linkage analysis using microsatellite markers spaced ,9 cM apart revealed a region on chromosome 20p13 that carried one or more asthma genes, achieving a Maximum Lod Score (MLS) of 2.24 at 9.99 cM. The addition of f...

Big is beautiful Bootstrapping a PoS tagger for Swedish

A statistical part-of-speech tagger trained on a one-million word Swedish corpus with validated tags was used to tag two considerably larger untagged corpora (≈ 78 and 20 million words, respectively) to bootstrap new, improved, tagger models. The new taggers all showed better accuracy both for seen and unseen words, and the best tagger had 97.02% overall accuracy evaluated on the original corpu...

Books, books, books.

IAPR Fellow, shares a personal sketch of his career in statistical pattern recognition. At the end, he poses questions to entice further research. Chart of some upcoming IAPR and non-IAPR workshops, conferences, and summer schools of interest to the I APR community. The views expressed in this newsletter represent the personal views of the authors and not necessarily those of their host institu...